It takes Hell
by twd5555
Summary: The story of a man trying to stay true to his virtues in the midst of the apocalypse. I am hoping to broaden the themes of "The Walking Dead" universe. It begins with examining the personalities of characters. But action will ascend each chapter if that's what you're looking for. Let me know what you think!
1. Chapter 1

_It takes Hell to differentiate between the Angels and the Devils (or the Devils and the Angels). _

_[Jeffrey Scarlett's journal, July 2012]_

Jeffrey's rocking chair creaked ever so slightly. Leaning forward, weight on his left elbow, Jeffrey flew his ink pen across the pages in cursive. He wrote whatever came to his mind, and that was usually the struggles for a man to stay true to his ideals.

At 37, he had found pursuing perfect morality most addicting. Distant from the anxiety of his youth, he enjoyed every one of these hot, humid nights in his quiet Southern town just writing and thinking.

But he knew that most people did not enjoy this practice. They lived the way that came most natural, the way others did. Or just the way their parents did.

He also knew it took longer to actually perform these ideals than it did to learn them. Changing personality takes not months, but years. Even decades.

And so he dreamt of worlds where morality values would have instantaneous, dramatic effects. Wars. Earthquakes. Asteroid collisons. Drug-ridden dystopian cities. Contagions. Nuclear warfare. They all fascinated him.

And, one Fall, such a world came. When sporadic cases of cannibalism arose on the East and West coasts, and one right in his home suburb outside of Chicago, he was genuinely disturbed. It had taken the last two decades of active moral change for him to actually genuinely care about the people attacked, rather than just out of fascination for the story and something to talk about with others. [As a hospital crisis manager, he was familiar with the underworld of drugs and violence. Jeffrey figured the outbreak related to the effects of bath salts that had occurred several years before, causing people to perform as if they were on some combination of LSD and cocaine. These had become popular in the more impoverished, rural South.]

For the first time since the Holidays, Jeff got in touch with his family. His parents in Barrington had long lost interest in him, or he had them; he was never sure, this depended on his mood. But he called them in July when the incident had happened in their own town. No, they did not know anyone involved.

Then, as it worsened, in mid-August, he suggested to his eldest sister in Philadelphia that she take a trip somewhere quieter:

"_Donovan's! This is Jenna speaking!"_

"_Jenna. It's Jeff, I—"_

"_Oh, hi Jeff! Thank you for calling. How are you?"_

"_Jenna. Who is watching Nicholas while you are at work?"_

"_Oh. Well, we have a nanny taking care of all that. We've been so busy you know, with Steven and the tumultuous markets and my practice. Just wild! Steven's confident that everything will go back to normal as usual in just a few weeks. But how are you?"_

"_Jenna. We might all be in danger. Our family. Everybody. What is your plan? Where will you go if it gets worse?"_

"_Nicky just got out of the bath. Call you back later!-"_

A week later, every major city had a reported incident. So Jeff called his little brother, Sam.

"_Hello."_

"_Sam. It's good to hear you're okay. Things are getting bad. What is your plan?"_

"_Oh. Did you read that article in __The Atlantic_ _this week? Did you hear that they think all this is some sort of neurological virus? My friend down in the Orange County is a doctor and he has a theory that it's somehow related to Avian Flu."_

"_Sam. What are you going to do? California is getting bad. It's safer here. Would you _please_ consider coming to Georgia?"_

"_Listen. Jeff. I've got a life here. And a girlfriend."_

"_Sammy. I love you. You've been an exciting little brother to watch grow. Promise me you will come to Georgia if it gets worse? Or go to the Rockies. Up at Alta Ski Resort maybe."_

"_Haha I haven't been there for years… Yes, if it gets worse. I will. Buh-bye, bro.-"_


	2. Chapter 2

_Survival once required strength, skill, experience, practice, maturity, focus, work-ethic. But sometime in the 19th century, living just meant you were not unlucky._

_[Jeffrey Scarlett's journal, August 2012]_

Jeff sipped Black Label scotch in his rocking chair and reflected on his position. The world seemed to be on the verge of apocalypse, but John was an able bodied man in the world's wealthiest country. He also had the advantage of starting in the small country town a Malcom. A small shock of adrenaline rang through his stomach and chest. But then, a single shot rang out. He knew from experience that someone had shot a shotgun a block away.

Having worked in prisons, and seen the trouble then men get into with firearms, Jeff realized that in any other place at any other time, upon hearing a gunshot you should hit the ground. But due to the strange reports of assaults executed by the unarmed, and brotherly attitude in Malcom, he grabbed his .537 shotgun from the basement. He had to spend almost a minute just digging through the basements desk drawer to find his keys to his gun closet (he had not fired one of his weapons for a decade.

He shoved some shells in his cargo shorts and sprinted out into the hottest of Georgia summer nights. With his heart beating at 135 beats per minute (he had a pretty good sense of this as a crisis manager) it felt great to sprint. He had not had a reason to run for many years. He had to keep readjusting his grip on the forestock because his hand slipped down the slick wood.

He turned his block's corner to where he thought the shot had come from. But, unlike in the movies, and as he had learned in his basic weapons training, a situation does not always present itself quickly and clearly:

He saw no gun, but rather a bleeding man groaning softly with an array of shotgun pellets in his thigh, pelvis, and torso. The man leaned against a rusty pickup.

He ran to the man. To not look for the source of the problem or considering the danger he was entering did not follow procedure. But Jeff had little regard for himself.

He hugged the ground by the wounded, shielding his torso and head behind the front tire. He saw the barrel of a shotgun, which looked like the shotgun based on the width of the barrel. It pointed toward him as the shape of a head began to appear under the car.

His hero instincts, the instincts of the young egotist told him to shoot. But twenty years of developing the mental maturity of a civilized adult, of valuing others as much as he did himself had quieted his impulses enough to consider the situation.

He moved his fingers off of the trigger and onto the guard, so that his trembling finger would not accidentally fire.

A whimpering on the other side began, and eventually formed the words, "Oh Gawwwwsh. Sorry. Don' shoot!" The voice was familiar.

If he had cared more about himself, he would have asked the man to drop his gun. But instead, he popped out from the car with his .537 pointed to the ground.

His supervisor at the State Hospital popped out from the car. "Sam!" Jeff exhaled. "What?"

Jeff ran to the wounded. Jeffrey noticed that the wounded looked strikingly similar to Sam.

The man looked Jeff right in the eyes. "Cousin Tommy, you're back!"

Jeff began to turn around to ask Sam what happened, but he felt the muzzle of a dull crack back of his head before he had the chance to see his face.


	3. Chapter 3

_"We are always one generation away from barbarism." –[quoting Roland H. Bainton in Jeffrey Scarlett's Journal, September 2012.]_

Jeff awoke in a mirror. The bright blue colors on the walls, the beeping of a heart-rate monitor.

The West Georgia St. John's Hospital was where John worked. He had never seen residence from the perspective of a resident. And he had all but rarely visited the ER (100 N),first floor, North Wing.

He had come to in a hospital once before. In college, he was surprised to find himself in a gown—alcohol poisoning.

In just the same manner, he came out of a haze to find himself in the hospital. And the same feeling of embarrassment, this time not from drinking too much, but rather from passing out in a scene of danger and blood.

"Welcome back, Crisis Manager!" Sam said factitiously. Sam chuckled, but Jeff could tell he had more on his mind.

Jeff thought he remembered riding in an ambulance for a brief moment.

"I'm worried you almost shot your boss last night, Jeff." Sam explained that in a scene of distress last night, he shot his father, Albert. Succumbing to dementia, Albert had run out of the house with a .39 in his hand, planning to go into Atlanta to daughter who had died thirty years prior. In desperation to stop him from leaving and in drunken stupor, Sam shot his father.

"Hope you didn't mind getting the knock-out," Sam sounded only a little remorseful. "Couldn't take any chances, y'know?" Jeff joined Sam to visit the father in the adjacent room. He was awake and stable, but everywhere below his torso was bandaged. He was in incredible in pain, as his left testicle had taken a direct hit from the shot.

Shocked about the trauma of the prior night, a million possibilities entered his head. He had an image of firing the shotgun point blank into Sam's head. Of mercy killing his Sam's father. He was terrified of all the possibilities.

Local news was on the hospital TV. Georgia had seen its first cases of undead. All in Atlanta. Also, a man had shot his own father. Jeff went to his hospital bed, but a restlessness in his head only allowed him to enter a shallow sleep state.


	4. Chapter 4

_"Crazy times call for crazy people." [Jeffrey Scarlett's Journal, September 2012]_

Jeff awoke at 11:00am. He walked up the 300W (third floor, West Wing, where the young mental patients were kept.)

He was one of three clinicians monitoring ten young mentally-ill patients in temporary 24-hour care. Although it was Saturday, and he did not usually work weekends And he reveled in his job. He was the type to become restless on weekends without his job to focus on.

Jeff made rounds. He asked patients about their progress. Helped them focus on their goals. And he entertained each of them with a different joke every day. ("What do you call a fish with no 'eyes'?" Answer: "A fshhhhh.")

One patient was named Dallas. She was 19, still too young to be in the adult wing of the psych ward. Dallas was extremely young and not too bright. She had a wan face, and her heart in the right place at all times. But she had not progressed, and remained in the hospital after three weeks, as compared to the normal stay of ten days.

"Dallas, how are you feeling today?" asked Jeff in the sing-song, bold voice he used only for the patients he knew best.

"Why are you here so early in the morning?" she asked meekly. "You usually don't come in so early."

Jeff focused his attention on his clipboard to feign focusing on something else.

"They did tell us what was happening on the news," continued Dallas. She was the rare nineteen-year-old who cared about things other than herself. "What do you think?"

"I'm thinking I have no idea what we're going to do with all of you if this spreads," he answered. "Now, let's focus on you."

Around noon parents began to show up to take their kids home from the coming scare, but the hospital could not release patients before their stay was up. A disaster had not yet been declared in the state of Georgia, so protocol required them to stay.

Simultaneously, on the first floor the ER's waiting room filled with people who were concerned that they had a fever. Supposedly, this was an early symptom of the outbreak. And patients waited for hours because doctors were overbooked. Waiting areas became packed, forcing some to wait in the wings. A general hysteria began to arise.

Parents of his patients began to visit and then refuse to leave without their kids. Mothers, mostly, back from work in their white collared shirts and work uniforms banged on automatically locking doors. Hospital security had the write to apprehend such violators, but they did not have the resources to control all of the calamity in the hospital.

Jeff waked to the hospital manager's room to request a plan. In the process, he was shuffled like a clam into the waiting area, and forced against a wall near the entrance.

A seven-foot-tall man, with and a potbelly, began pushing people out of the way. "I need to get out. I need to get out!" rang his guttural voice. He began taking swings, and took down a security guard. A

A man Jeff recognized as an anasthesiologist snuck up from behind the giant and injected a needle into his right buttox. The mans eyesbecame glassy, and then closed as his body slumped to the floor, helped down by the doctor and some bold volunteers. "Damn meth head," said one of the secretaries.

The manager was completely consumed, so by the time Jeff climbed the stairs back to 300E, eight of his ten patients had left with their parents in the confusion of the hospital. Only Dallas, whom Jeff knew was long estranged from her parents, and a ten-year-old boy remained.


	5. Chapter 5

_"And in the air there was that mysterious excitement that comes at the changing of the seasons."-F. Scott Fitzgerald [Quoted in Jeffrey Scarlett's Journal, September 2012]_

Jeff drove home at midnight. He drove east on the interstate for twenty minutes and exited north to Malcom. All twelve of Malcom's squad cars ran down Main Street.

* * *

He turned on 24-hour news. The twenty largest cities in the United States had all had mysterious cases of erratic and vicious human behavior. Two-hundred cases in New York, alone. Schools were closed nationwide, but the Surgeon General called for calm—all cases were being flown to the Center for Disease Control in Washington, D.C, where the government would find a solution quickly.

Jeff lay in bed. His open window brought in air that was just slightly cooler than usual—a front was moving through. To Jeff, even the small change in temperature made him feel like it was time for a Homecoming football game. Coming from Chicago, it had taken Jeff some time to adjust to the fact that the leaves did not drop in Malcom. And that the temperature rarely dropped below 50.

The boost of adrenaline drifted through his stomach. He felt anticipatory. He could not sleep, so he watched more news. He feared for his family. His little brother Sam was so far away on the West Coast and too carefree to turn his attention on something this big. Images of his parents getting stuck inside their house and of his nephew escaping his sister's site clouded his thoughts.

He felt responsible for their wellbeing. But he remembered the wisdom he often told his patience, that before you can take care of others, you must care for yourself—"Just like giving assistance to others with the oxygen mask on an airplane."

He made some coffee downstairs. He returned upstairs to take one last shower, and filled the bathtub with emergency drinking water. He went to the cellar to unlock his gun case. He needed to be able access them in haste.


	6. Chapter 6

_But who will take care of the weak, the ill, the locked-up, the helpless? [Jeffrey Scarlett's Journal, September, 2012]_

A week passed. Jeff spent most nights in the hospital. The majority of the staff had left, so Jeff felt he had no choice. Meanwhile, the town seemed safe as usual, except everyone stayed inside. The cable news and the internet had come to halt.

But the hospital had run out of food. The truck full of food that was supposed to come once a month had not. So he drove ten minutes south on the empty interstate to the shopping center to find, to his surprise, that Wal-Mart had not been abandoned.

The lights were still on. But the glass on the sliding doors was shattered on the floor. The food section was nearly empty, but some items were scattered through the three aisles. A makeshift sign (made from three small pasteboards and written on with a sharpie) declared all prices tripled. It did not matter to him. Living single, he had enough discretionary income.

He ran his arm through each shelf, dropping cans and boxes to fill up two shopping carts. Then, he went up to the only operating register to find an obese, balding manager. Apparently, he was the only one still operating the store. His blue polo shirt said "Chuck" and it looked particularly small, even for a man with his frame and gut. His stomach stretched out the Wal-Mart smiley face so that it looked equally overweight.

"Chuck" rang up all the items, and took out his pocket calculator to multiply the total by three. Jeff could see him "That will be nine-hundred and eighty-five dollars, please! Oh, and ten cents." Jeff slipped out his credit card. "Oh, cash only, please!" This was mysterious, seeing as machine still glowed blue.

Jeff opened his wallet to find two twenties and a ten. He never carried bills anymore. He threw his cash on the register and filled a paper bag with a random amount of groceries. Chuck did not object, but as Jeff left he noticed that Chuck did not open the register, but rather pocketed the money.

More days passed. Sleeping on a hospital bed became normal to Jeff. He brought all of his food from home to the hospital to serve the few patients remaining. He guessed that Malcom had escaped the calamity—that the television would turn on soon and everyone would return to work.

But one rainy night, Dallas, his patient, complained of hunger. She was a gaunt to begin with—she had had anorexia nervosa in high school. Feeling guilty and restless, Jeff walked downstairs to step into the rainy night.

Head down, Jeff walked to the automatic doors in the front. His teeth were gritted in frustration. He heard the first set of doors open, as usual, but the second set opened at exactly the same time. This seemed off. He glanced his eyes up without moving his head to see two women shuffling through the door. They were dressed in executive clothes, not the typical garb of Malcolm. And a man was unconscious on the ground, bleeding profusely from his right hamstring, right where the door had opened. "Oh, my God! Get him inside. Let me get a gurney."

Jeff dashed to the E.R. to roll a gurney back to the entrance. This was not his usual department, but he figured he would help, considering only two doctors remained. The automatic doors shut and closed because they were still being triggered. They had not moved him. They leaned over him, knees on the ground.

"Come on!" Jeff shouted. They glanced up at him, but then their attention went back to the man. Then, they lurched at the man's neck and bit. Every ounce of him wanted to help the man, but he knew that he would only get himself hurt. He thought of the oxygen mask parable.

Jeff dashed away to the emergency room, which, fortunately, required a key fob to pass. It had taken him a moment, but he felt his body tighten in a panic. The clarity of thought he had upon seeing the injured man vanished. He had to sit down on a hospital bed stop himself from feinting.

Attention. He needed to garner attention. But the doctor, the nurse, and the remaining patients were on levels above. He could go to the front desk and call them through the intercom, but this would requiring approaching the automatic doors. No. He would go upstairs through the security of one of the back sets of stairs.

Remaining calm was a rule of thumb in working in a hospital. Screaming in the hospital was usually the job of mental patients, not staff. So Jeff did not feel quite right running up the stairs and through every wing screaming, "They're here! Zombies. Doctor!"

He climbed passed Dallas and his other patient on the third floor, and found both the doctor and the nurse in 400N. He caught his breath and explained the situation.

The young doctor, standing at an unimpressive 5'6", created a plan. Jeff knew that certain doctor was always the one to take command, even when his confidence was unfounded. "Alright, we'll take them all up to the 500S and barricade the doors."

Jeff and the nurse agreed. Nurse Jannett had worked for decades, a reliable nurse who dedicated her life to her patients. The type, like Jeff, to clock out just so that the administrator would not think they were overworking themselves.


End file.
